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Exclusive: Australia’s biggest environmental philanthropist says private investment to clean up reef ‘doesn’t make sense’ with current land clearing

Private investment in work to restore the Great Barrier Reef is likely dry up if the Queensland government fails to pass tighter land-clearing laws, warns Australia’s biggest environmental philanthropist.

David Thomas, who has donated $30m and bequeathed another $30m to environmental causes in Australia, told Guardian Australia that state and federal governments’ drive for private investment in Great Barrier Reef water quality projects would be unsuccessful if rampant land clearing continues.

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If all German households went renewable, they still would not be able to buy all of the renewable electricity in the country. We mainly need to get the industry on board—and electric mobility going.

Under the rapid growth of Australian energy storage market, the 7th Energy Storage Australia 2016 is going to present over 300 professionals from 23 countries in October.

Labor's support of Coalition raid on ARENA is direct attack on transition to renewable energy, on innovation, on jobs and on addressing global climate emergency.

Solar and storage installations on Australian apartment blocks make up one of the largest and most rapidly growing sectors in our cities. So why aren't we hearing more about them?

A recent Accenture survey has asked Millennials – Australia’s second-largest cohort after Gen X – what they want from their energy providers. The answers are a clarion call to those utilities and retailers who still believe business-as-usual will do.

After four years of tracking Australia's rooftop solar system prices, we take a look back over our data at some of the noteworthy trends that have emerged over this period.

A City of Sydney-backed community solar project that will put a 30kW PV system on the roof of a craft brewery in the city’s inner west will be opened to local investors this weekend.

GreenSync to deliver landmark community-based demand response, energy storage project for United Energy, to avoid network upgrade on Mornington Peninsula.

A satellite tag fitted to a hen harrier has stopped transmitting in the same mountains where eight tagged eagles "vanished", says RSPB Scotland.

The upcoming US presidential election could make or break the Paris climate agreement.

Unlike the previous Kyoto Protocol, the entire Paris Agreement (which is yet to enter into force) was shaped to allow the US to legally join through a presidential-executive agreement. The lack of binding targets for emissions cuts or financing means that the agreement just needs President Barack Obama’s approval, rather than a majority vote in the US Senate.

It was a politically expedient move that I predicted in a paper earlier last year. Clearly the world has learned, for better or for worse, from the experience of the Kyoto Protocol, which the US never ratified due to the politically divided Senate.

But watering down the treaty to allow US participation is a risky strategy. Rather than relying on strong rules or ambition, the Paris Agreement depends on legitimacy through universal participation. With enough countries on board there is hope that it could change investment and policy patterns across the world.

That legitimacy hinges on US participation, and Obama will not determine the continued involvement of the US. The November election will decide what role the US plays in the agreement.

The Trump card

I suggested in a recent paper that a presidency under a Republican candidate such as Donald Trump could be fatal to the Paris Agreement. The damage could be done on two counts: the US withdrawing from the agreement and/or rescinding its domestic actions and targets.

Trump has already been vocal about his intention to “cancel” or “renegotiate” the agreement. However, some have claimed that having the agreement enter into force before November would bind Trump to the agreement for at least three years (due to one clause in the agreement).

Entry into force essentially means the agreement becomes operational and has legal force under international law. This would require 55 countries accounting for at least 55% of global greenhouse gas emissions (so far 22 countries representing 1% of global emissions have signed). However, there are three problems with this simple analysis.

First, it is unlikely that the Paris Agreement will enter into force before the inauguration of the next US president. While US ratification of Paris only requires the approval of Obama, for other countries the process is much more strenuous and time-consuming. Having 55 countries and at least three of the biggest emitters in the world ratify the agreement in the next six months is a high expectation. The Kyoto Protocol took eight years to go from agreement to entry into force.

Second, Trump could simply drop out of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the overarching treaty under which Paris was created. This would take only a year and would lead to automatic withdrawal from Paris. Dropping out of the entire climate negotiations would generally seem like an extreme move. However, for a loose cannon like Trump it may be just another day in the White House.

Third, Trump would not need to withdraw officially to throw the agreement into chaos. Refusing to send a US delegation to the negotiations, or simply reneging on the US’s national climate target would do just as much, if not more, damage than withdrawing.

And let’s be clear, a Trump presidency would mean the US would miss its domestic climate targets.

Analysis by Climate Action Tracker suggests that the US would need additional measures to meet its pledge of reducing emissions by 26-28% on 2005 levels by 2025. This is still the case even if the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan is carried out.

Trump will be further weakening, rather than strengthening, climate action. The Republican platform on energy can be roughly summarised as “drill baby, drill”. It promises to approve the Keystone XL pipeline, maximise use of domestic fossil fuel reserves as part of an “all of the above energy policy” and rein in the powers of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

Is there anything the Paris Agreement could do to stop a renegade US under Trump?

Unfortunately not. The agreement lacks any measures to deal with countries outside the agreement and has only a “non-adversarial and non-punitive” compliance mechanism. Paris has far fewer teeth than the Kyoto Protocol.

A rogue US missing its targets with no consequences could be a fatal blow to the legitimacy of Paris – it would showcase to the world just how weak the agreement truly is.

Clinton’s climate

It’s clear that Trump would be an unmitigated disaster for the Paris Agreement, but what would Clinton mean for the climate?

The impact of a presidency under Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton is more difficult to predict. In the short term it is likely to be business-as-usual for the climate talks.

Clinton is a supporter of the Paris agreement, having declared in her keynote speech to the Democratic National Convention: “I’m proud that we shaped a global climate agreement – now we have to hold every country accountable to their commitments, including ourselves.” Under Clinton, the US would remain a party to the agreement or legally adopt it if Obama had not yet done so.

The bigger question is whether Clinton will drive action to ensure the US increases its targets. The current Democratic platform gives hope that she will.

The platform calls for a second world war-style mobilisation to address climate change. It explicitly calls for a price on carbon and aims for 50% of US electricity generation to be from “clean energy” sources within a decade.

However, Clinton is by no means bound by the party platform, which has been moulded to appeal to supporters of the more pro-climate Bernie Sanders within the party. Clinton’s climate credentials have been called into question, particularly with her controversial support of fracking.

It is also uncertain how much Clinton could do without congressional support. Arguably, Obama is already pushing the limits of presidential powers. Indeed, the Clean Power Plan is being contested in the Supreme Court.

A Clinton administration will likely do little to hinder climate action, but it also looks unlikely to take the drastic action needed to put the world on track to limiting global warming to 1.5℃ or 2℃.

Ultimately, the reason for Paris’s success may prove to be its undoing. Relying on the goodwill of a single president is a short-sighted gamble. Come November, the world may once again have a heavy price to pay for investing so much hope in US leadership.

Luke Kemp has previously received funding from the Australian and German governments.

Ira Glass the radio show host says global warming may not be amusing or surprising but it is still the most important thing that’s happening

The documentary broadcaster Ira Glass, the man behind the hit radio programme This American Life, is in Britain this week with his theatre show, Three Acts, Two Dancers, One Radio Host. The production, a collaboration with the experimental dancers of Monica Bill Barnes & Company, puts storytelling and dance together in an improbable but, the reviews say, endearing and entertaining combination. The dancers like to bring dance into places were no one expects it. Mr Glass does the same with documentary. The collaborators are united in wanting to tell serious stories in an engaging manner.

Not many subjects defeat Mr Glass’s creativity. But climate change, he admits, is beyond even his midas touch with a tale. “Any minute I’m not talking about climate change it’s like I’m turning my back on the most important thing that’s happening to us,” he said recently. The trouble with it is that it is “neither amusing nor surprising”. It is “resistant to journalism”.

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Steve Emsley is wrong when he compares tidal lagoons with Hinkley and asks why tidal energy is not even being discussed (Letters, 17 August). The latest estimated cost of the lagoon proposed for Swansea Bay is £1.3bn. Hinkley would produce 65 times as much electricity, all day, every day – true “baseload”. Tidal lagoons would produce variable amounts (four times as much on a spring tide as on a neap tide in Swansea and a bigger difference further up the Severn estuary) and the generation would be intermittent (four three-hour blocks a day) – that’s not “baseload”.

Lagoons could only produce 8% (about 25TWh a year) of the UK’s electricity requirements (a figure challenged by tidal energy experts), if five others followed Swansea, each many times larger and much more costly than Swansea (many times more than £5bn in total). But consent for the next two (huge lagoons further up the Severn estuary off Cardiff and Newport) is most unlikely because of various EU environmental designations (special area of conservation, special protection area etc). As to why no one is discussing them: in fact, Charles Hendry is conducting a review of tidal lagoons to assess, among other things, whether they could play a cost-effective role in the UK energy mix (see www.hendryreview.com). Some think the review was prompted by belated government realisation that the figures bandied around for lagoons just don’t add up.
Phil Jones
Ynystawe, Swansea

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Astronomers capture rare images of a white dwarf - before, during and after it exploded as a "classical nova".

Scientists have identified a new species of dolphin that lived 25 million years ago.

This week we’re staging protests on the ‘crime scene’ of the world’s affected reefs to send a signal that we’re not going to let fossil fuel firms get away with murder

Coral reefs are probably Earth’s most life-packed ecosystem; those who’ve had the privilege of diving in the tropics know the reef as an orderly riot of colour and flow, size and shape.

Which is why a white, dead reef is so shocking – as shocking in its way as a human corpse lying on the street, which still takes the form of the living breathing person it used to be, but now suddenly is stopped forever, the force that made it real suddenly and grotesquely absent.

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Survey finds that 69% of visitors to the world’s largest coral reef system are motivated by the fear that it might disappear, reports Climate Home

In a reversal of the normal travel bucket list, tourists are rushing to see the Great Barrier Reef before it dies.

Half of the reef’s coral has disappeared in the past three decades due to a combination of warming ocean temperatures, coastal development, invasive starfish and agricultural runoff.

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Guardian environment reporter Oliver Milman joins a group of scientists on an underwater expedition off the Bermuda coast to help chart its hidden depths and gauge the general health of the area’s reef and coral. Travelling in a two-man submersible, Milman and submarine pilot Kelvin Magee go on a journey 500ft below the surface

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The deep ocean makes up 95% of Earth, yet only 0.0001% has been explored – the Guardian joined a mission off Bermuda looking deeper than ever before

Video: a dive into Bermuda’s hidden depths

The largest migration on Earth is very rarely seen by human eyes, yet it happens every day. Billions of marine creatures ascend from as far as 2km below the surface of the water to the upper reaches of the ocean at night, only to then float back down once the sun rises.

This huge movement of organisms – ranging from tiny cockatoo squids to microscopic crustaceans, shifting for food or favourable temperatures – was little known to science until relatively recently.

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New fossil fuel advocacy group launched to celebrate an industry that’s driving dangerous climate change

Bright and glistening with all the glory of youth and promise, her eyes glance upwards. A jet crosses a cloudless sky.

A field of wheat sways in the breeze. She opens her arms in a wide embrace, open to the horizon.

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